Testing IE – Virtual PC
Okay, I've complained a lot about Internet Explorer. With good reason, in some cases, sometimes just because I'm complaining.
One of the things that has always bugged me about IE - you can only have one version on your computer. That makes it tough to test versions 6, 7, and 8 without having multiple computers.
Microsoft stepped up and created virtual machine images for each variable. See IE6 and IE7 Running on a Single Machine.
Do I want to be using multiple VMs to test a browser? No, but at least now I can do it.
Why I cross the street ….
Some people, when they get see a young man, dressed in hoodies and sagging jeans, walking along the sidewalk, cross over and walk on the other side of the street. Me? I cross over when I see someone walking their dog, but only if they have dressed their dog in human clothes. Yes, that's right, they scare me. Not the dog, the owner. I mean, how can you predict how someone that would do that to their dog is going to behave? You can't. It's a sign of a twisted mind.
Email, and the “other Steve Anderson”
It happened again today. Someone signed up for an account, this time at a soccer website, and used my email address.
It's understandable, really. I got lucky. When GMail first started, I got an early invite, and snagged the email address steve.anderson@gmail.com. Due to the way Google does email addressing, I also have steveanderson@gmail.com and steveanderson+anything@gmail.com.
So, if someone says, "Email me at steveanderson16@gmail.com" and the person only hears the steveanderson@gmail.com part of it, I get that email. Same for steveandersen@gmail.com. Same for stevenanderson@gmail.com. You get the idea.
I usually just ignore the emails, but lately I've been trying to get the email to the right person. I mean, if I asked a car dealer for a quote on a car, and that quote got sent to a different Steve Anderson, I'd hope he'd send it on to me. The problem is, how does he know where to send it?
I got lucky the other day. I got an email, not for me, that had a PDF attachment that included the correct email address for the "other Steve Anderson". I sent it on to him and suggested he tell his contacts to update their addresses for him.
That's a bad solution, though. The right solution should be self-service. I should be able to quickly, and easily, forward that email to a service that posts the email in such a way that if the "other Steve Anderson" looks, he can find it. Here's the use case. Follow along and let me know what you think.
I go to a website. It's cool. It's about football. It's about my favorite team, the Minnesota Vikings. I want to write something on the forum, so I sign up for an account. In my excitement, though, I enter the wrong email address. Instead of steveanderson@gmail.com, I enter steveandersen@gmail.com. The Steve Andersen that actually gets email at steveandersen@gmail.com gets the email intended for me. He forwards it to "wrongemail@theothersteveanderson.com". He's done. I look at my email and don't get the activation email I'm expecting. I visit theothersteveanderson.com, see on the "Unclaimed Wrong Emails" list the email I'm expecting. I claim it, activate my account, and move on. Nice, huh?
Now there are all kinds of issues with this idea. What about trolls looking for email address? What about someone claiming all the wrong emails? I don't know how to solve those, but I think the idea has merit.
This sounds like a fun project that one could cobble together using existing technologies. Maybe the right way to do it is via twitter (follow @theothersteveanderson and direct reply to the person that posts). Maybe the right way to do it is via FaceBook. Maybe it's using some kind of web content management system like Magnolia or Drupal. Maybe it could be as simple as having a forum, thread can be opened via email, and anyone that's a member can claim the email by closing the thread.
What do you think? I'd really like some feedback.
New Blog Software – Back to WordPress
While helping my wife set up her blog I took a look at whether Movable Type had been updated. It had. Version 5 was out. Naturally I looked at upgrading. The one thing that MT had over WordPress was support of PostgreSQL. They dropped that with version 5. So, my blog is back onto WordPress.
With that, of course, are the normal caveats. Some links may be broken. Some formatting may be bad. Sorry. Let me know if the comments and I'll fix it up.
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Filterchains – just another reason to love ant
One of the projects I'm working on is conditional publishing of DITA content using ant. Basically what I want to do is, given a list of files, build the output that is affected when those files change. We manage our files using Perforce, so the workflow is something like this:
- Check out files
- Edit/modify content
- Run conditional build
- Review output
- Check-in files
When you check files out of Perforce, they get put into a changelist, so, to get my file list, I need to ask Perforce what files are in the changelist. Perforce has a nice way to do that. The command is,
p4 opened -c
The problem is the output includes a bunch of information I don't want. I get lines like this:
//doc/main/core/build/build.xml#164 - edit change 1075456 (text) by sanderson@docbuild
what I want is
//doc/main/core/build/build.xml
or, even better,
files-in-changelist=/home/sanderson/doc/main/core/build/build.xml
That format is the format ant expects for a property files. Property files are nice, because you can load them up and use that property in ant.
What to do, what to do? In my case, I turn to ant. If I have a build issue, someone else has probably run into it, so, I look there first.
Sure enough, ant has a task called filterchain for exactly these kinds of uses. Here's what I wound up with:
Just another reason to love ant.
What Phoebe Did While Mom was At Her Retreat
Click on the images for full screen fun!
Well. Mommy is at a retreat, so Daddy and I decided to have some fun. We started out with a lot of playing at home. I mean, we had breakfast, and tub, but the fun thing is that Dad lets me run through the sprinklers naked. Then a nap. I don't know why Dad thinks I need a nap, but, well, he does. We had a good lunch, and then, Dad made me put on some clothes and we strolled down to Habitot.
By the time I got there, I was ready for a snack, which Dad made me have in the hall.
He said it wasn't nice to the other kids to eat in front of them.
Then we went in, and they have lots of fun stuff. One of my favorites was playing in the water. 
Bubbles, and buckets, and water, and, cars that you ride around in and ... It was fun!
Dad also pulled me around in a trailer, and I climbed around in something they call the wiggle wall, and, oh, I painted! 
We closed the joint down, then came home.
I got a little tired.
After that was dinner 
and then an early bedtime. I was still tired.
I missed Mommy, but Daddy and I had fun.
Review: An Unholy Alliance – Susanna Gregory
I was hoping that this book, like the Brother Cadfael books the premise so resembles, would be a good bedtime book. Enjoyable, engaging, but not so much that I would stay up all night reading it.
Sadly, no.
I could never find myself caring about any of the characters, and the action was too slow to keep me engaged.
The writing was fine, not earth shattering, but appropriate for the genre (historical fiction/mystery). The story just bored me, though, and, half way through, I stopped trying any more.
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Another piece of the puzzle for replacing fossil fuels
Image via Wikipedia
Oslo to Run Buses On Biomethane - the biomethane is coming from their sewage treatment plants, and it's a great way to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
That's cool, but, the really cool thing is the way they got to this. Instead of starting with, "Let's use biodiesel in all our busses!" or "Electricity is the only way to go!", they started asking, "What resources do we have to work with?" and came up with this solution.
That's the way we are going to replace fossil fuels - each person and organization (and I include local, state, and federal governments when I say organization) is going to have to ask the question, "What is best for me?".
My boss recently put in solar cells to generate electricity for her house. She put in enough cells to generate about 25% of the power she uses every month. That's what works for her.
We shouldn't try to replace fossil fuels with X, no matter what X is - we need to look at multiple solutions so that we don't find ourselves in the same situation we are now, bound to one source of energy, live or die.
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No wonder newspapers are having such a hard time
If this article is to be believed, and there's no reason I can see to doubt their math, Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle.
I think the obvious second point of this is that it's amazing how cheap e-ink is now. I wonder how long it will be until there's a "E-book of the month" club that gives you, upon subscription, an ebook reader.